Every week, yet another journalist or online marketer predicts the Death of Blogging. Ironicially, sometimes these ‘predictions’ are made by bloggers.

Far from dying, there’s a resurgence in blogging, judging by the flow of private equity and growth of blog networks.

Just look at the nearly 1,200 submissions for the Round 5 submissions for the 9rules Blog Network or check the stats at the Blog Network List. Darren Rowse’s b5media blog network got a nice chunk of capital funding too.

2007 will see a further evolution of blogging as we know it.

Perhaps ‘blogging’ (a truncation of weblog) may evolve as a term to fully encompass what it represents.

Here’re 4 trends I see this year.

Offline to Online Content Migration

Even without Amazon and Google’s efforts to digitize content for the Internet, a multitude of content publishers are bringing more content online every day.

Besides info portals, such as About.com and Wikipedia, individuals bloggers are blogging about their pet topics.

Aside from quoting online news sources, bloggers often cite print media, cable television, movies and other old line media (I guess this year someone will start call it media 1.0?). During this process, it’s inevitable that more content will migrate from a paper-based medium to an electronic one.

It only means that the online will will only continue to get more info-rich.

At the same time, it also means that third world countries where dial-up Internet connections (remember those?) at speeds of 28.8 kbps (that’s kilobits, not megabits) will only get further stratified by the digital divide.
Beyond food, water and shelter, the info-rich online environment will provide an opportunity to accelerate progress in the developing world.

Blog Income Monetization Opportunities Increase

Bloggers increasingly have a number of options to generate income from their blogs.

Options like Google Adsense publishing, paid content posting (from the likes of PayPerPost), banners and text links, affiliate marketing and CPA networks, provide options for bloggers to go beyond just posting on a ‘passion’ (ie unpaid) basis to considering blogging as an alternative to a 9-to-5 job.

For newer bloggers however, it will take some time before they get their rhythmn going.

And I’d still advice newer bloggers to build up good content and develop a following before cramming as much adsense and banners on your blogs.

Most bloggers will be able to generable a couple of hundred dollars to a thousand dollars worth of blogging-related income once they learn the ropes. But to step up to the next level of a professional blogger, it’ll require effective blogging strategies. (For which I’m currently developing products to address those needs).

Blogging Goes The Rich Media Route

Perhaps it’s due to it’s traditional association with maintaining an online diary, but blogging still remains very text-based. You might sometimes get the occassional graphic or photo accompanying the posts.

To date, the number of blogs with audio or video still remains quite low. In fact, a number of blog directories have dropped the vlog (or video blog) category altogether this year, due to underwhelming demand.

Attaching a video from YouTube can sometimes be a bugbear (even if it’s as simple as pasting HTML code into your blog).

Plus, you’ve probably encountered the ‘bandwidth traffic jam’ which hits many of these video hosting sites at peak hours.
In the coming year, we might see more Internet bandwidth expanding as Internet Service Providers buy bigger chunks of bandwidth, and increase bandwidth to the video service providers.

We might even see new video caching services available which will help ease the video bandwidth bottleneck.

As for the immediate future, podcasting looks like it has the next lowest barrier of entry, especially as bloggers become more adept at audio applications like Audacity.

Email went mainstream approximately in the mid 1990s, when email addresses started appearing on business cards, despite the fact that email has been around since the 1960s.

The predecessors to RSS (really simple syndication) were developed in the mid-1990s. And although push-type services like BackWeb and Pointcast were a little ahead of the curve, bloggers are among the early adopters of RSS services.

To date most casual Internet surfers have no idea what RSS is, much less how to subscribe to a RSS feed. (You could’ve included me in that category about half a year ago).

Added to that is the fact that RSS readers tended to be web-based or required third party applications to access. Which makes RSS a mess for most net surfers to get into.

Will 2007 be the year that RSS readers become more user friendly? (I still have problems successfully subscribing to Atom and RSS feeds sometimes)

Here’s a thought, if all email clients supported RSS feeds and even better, RSS appeared as almost indistinguishable from email, wouldn’t we see widespread adoption of RSS?

—

The Blogging Predictions 2007 meme

Those were my blogging predictions for 2007 and I intended to launch an Internet meme off this post.

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About Me

Hi, I’m Andrew Wee, an Asia-based internet marketer.I’ve been involved in the online world since 1997, having worked at one of Asia’s first content portals and helping to develop and project manage several content sites focused on verticals such as news, stocks, mutual funds and consumer/entertainment.Continue reading here